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IBM ps2/30 hard drive replacement

Spent several hours examining my IBM ps2/model 30 and
came to a conclusion, that unfortunately, the hard drive is busted.

Initially I thought it was a 286, but it seems to be 086 instead.
The floppy is 720kb. That took me a while to realize and to find suitable DD discs
and to find boot disc image from the internet. But I did that, and got it to boot to dos.

Computer even recognized the hard drive at first. It is a 20Mb IBM hard drive.
At first, I was able to browse a few directories. On some I could get result to DIR command.
From some directories, it was not possible, but resulted read errors. Also, copying file from HD to disc
gave read errors.

I decided to format the drive, so I removed the partition with Fdisk and created a new one.
Unfortunately, format will not begin at cylinder 0 - gets stuck there immediately and says
track 0 bad - disk unusable.

The drive also gives bad sounds (from bearings or somewhere). This computer has also spent decades
in cold storage and that is a good guess why the HD has crashed.

Now, for a replacement, has anyone tried IDE drive to IBM ps2 ?
Or MFM drive? I have both, 100mb IDE and I'm guessing 40Mb MFM drives, but
no controller card for either. I do not know if either would work, so I'm hesitating
to buy either. The problem with those might be how to access bios and IBM hard drives
might be very hard to find nowadays.

Then there is the possibility for IDE-CF adapters, but I'm wondering if those have the
same issue on how to assign it correctly in bios.

Perhaps the safest bet is to try IDE to CF card adapter with this one.

I would avoid getting another of those IBM drives to replace it. They are notoriously bad at this point in time and are no longer reliable. You might need to go through five or ten of them until you found one that works and even then it probably wouldn't work for very long. Some other alternative would seem to be the best idea.

PM me if you're looking for 3½" or 5¼" floppy disks. EMail “ ” For everything else, Take Another Step

The HD in my Model 30 286 was kind of like that, sometimes it would show up and work and sometimes not, and it would give errors reading. I had to recap the logic board on the HD and it was 100% reliable after that.

Heh, after having a look at this, there is an additional problem.
I cannot find any power cables for old IDE hard drive. Brilliant,
how they did it their own way at the IBM, back in the days of IBM ps2 !

Also, there are only 8bit ISA slots (and then, not too many of them either).
The IO card is 16 bit that I have.

Heh, after having a look at this, there is an additional problem.
I cannot find any power cables for old IDE hard drive. Brilliant,
how they did it their own way at the IBM, back in the days of IBM ps2 !

Also, there are only 8bit ISA slots (and then, not too many of them either).
The IO card is 16 bit that I have.

I have an XT-IDE in mine, with a 32MB DoM on it... works a charm, however mine is a model 30 286.

I do have two working HDD's for that model, WD-325Q drives. No bad sectors, installed with IBM PC-DOS 5.0 and drive heads parked... but I switched to the XT-IDE in mine since it's a Model 30/286 that came with a 30MB harddisk and those are impossible to find. But the XT-IDE works flawless so you could try that (I soldered mine myself from a kit, connected the HD LED from the front to the XT-IDE card so apart from not making any sound you can't tell there's no harddisk in it).

I can answer that as I have a model 30 as well that uses the same drive.
The boards use a cluster of SMD's near the edge connector that show the typical signs of leakage but further inward IBM used miniature through-hole radials that are visibly good and not leaking but read with terrible ESR.

My drive would respond fine on advanced diagnostics until you tried a read or write operation, then puke. A capacitor replacement cleared that.

I've heard that capacitors are becoming an issue, but haven't experienced it myself on hard disks. Definitely a problem on PS/2 floppy drives. As NeXT said, check that before anything else.

If you do end up replacing the drive, XT-IDEs work fine in the PS/2 Model 30 (and 30/286, for that matter). I don't have kits listed at the moment but I'm in the process of getting more together -- too busy with work and the new building and holidays!